Transportation

LEFT: Convict transport ships were crowded and unhygienic – and not everyone survived the journey RIGHT: After saying their last goodbyes, those bound for Australia often never saw their families again

BANISHED TOT A A LAND DOWN UNDER

Rather than fill the prisons or issue the death penalty, judges chose to ship tens of thousands of convicts to Australia

n 13 May 1787, a fleet of

O11 ships carrying around 1,400 men, women and children, including around 700 convicts, left Portsmouth Harbour to sail to the other side of the world. Thieves, protesters and petty criminals were crammed below deck, with the rolling of the waves and the wails of their companions the only sounds they would hear for the next eight months – the amount of time it would take the so-called First Fleet to reach the shores of Australia.

The voyage marked the start of Britain’s use of penal colonies Down Under, but transportation as a form of criminal punishment had first emerged in the 17th century. At the time of the fleet’s sailing, the Bloody Code was in full force and many crimes carried the death penalty (see page 42). Sentencing a person to exile in a foreign land was regarded by many judges as preferable to execution, and had the added bonus of making the criminal another country’s problem.

The 1717 Transportation Act made banishing people overseas even simpler, stating that anyone sentenced for a serious crime would spend 14 years in an overseas penal colony, and anyone guilty of lesser felonies, such as theft, would be given a seven-year exile – the majority of people transported fell into the latter category. Also transported were protesters, such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs (who were punished, in 1834, for essentially forming a trade union). Around 85 per cent of convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868 were men, although their ages ranged wildly, from boys as young as nine to men well over 80 years old.

LOSS OF THE AMERICAS

By 1775, more than 50,000 convicts had been transported to North America (excluding Canada) and the West Indies. The creation of settlements and the amount of work needed to turn them into thriving colonies made the New World a clear choice. Convicts were shipped mostly to Virginia or Maryland, or to islands of the West Indies, where many spent their sentences in back-breaking labour on the plantations. Those transported helped build the American colonies, although with the slave trade bringing millions of enslaved Africans to enforced work on the plantations too, the need for convict labour remained relatively small.

After 1776, when America declared its independence, it was clear that the

An illustration shows life inside the prison hulk used to hold the Tolpuddle Martyrs before they were transported in 1834

ocountry was closed for business as far as s transportation was concerned. This presented a huge problem for Britain. Peoplee continued to pour through the judicialu system and the prisons were full to o bursting, but there was nowhere for thoseh sentenced to transportation to go.

As a desperate stopgap, creaking exwarships were hastily thrown into service once more, having been repurposed as floating prisons in rivers all over Britain. Life on one of these ‘hulks’ was appalling: dangerously overcrowded, with diseases like cholera and typhoid rife. Inmates would be forced ashore for hard labour – as much as 10 hours a day in the summer months – and once back on board, would be clapped in irons and made to sleep on the bare floor. Death rates on the hulks were high; from 1776 to 1795, nearly a third of convicts held on the prison ships perished.

A proper fix was needed, and, in 1783, Australia was proposed as a destination. Four years later, the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts set sail under the command of Royal Navy Captain Arthur Phillip, and set up at Sydney Cove the first penal colony. A second – in Tasmania – followed in 1803, and a third came in Western Australia in 1850. In total, more than 160,000 people were transported to Australia. In 1833, the peak year of Australian convict transportation, there were some 7,000 new arrivals.

Once they had arrived, convicts were assigned work according to their skills, although everything involved physical labour. For six days a week, from sunrise to sunset, gangs of workers constructed roads and bridges, split apart rocks, or worked on farms helping free settlers.

THE PATH TO REDEMPTION

Phillip, who became the first governor of New South Wales, thought “honest sweat” would help reform convicts and put them on the path to redemption. Those who failed to follow the rules were treated harshly: flogging and solitary confinement were common tools, while chronic rule-breakers were packed off to the most isolated settlements. But for those who buckled down, Australia provided opportunities unavailable in Britain. For good behaviour, convicts could be rewarded with a ticket of leave, which allowed them privileges such as being able to seek work for themselves.

Once freed, many chose to remain in Australia. The cost of a ticket home was steep, while staying meant they could maybe even buy some land of their own. In the words of Reverend Richard Johnson from Sydney, former convicts were building a life “better than many farmers in England”.

Despite the positive outcomes for many convicts, the tide was turning

MAIN: Arthur Phillip addresses British settlers in Australia. Of the c1,400 people on board the ‘First Fleet’, 736 were convicts BELOW: Obtaining a ticket of leave gave convicts certain privileges

THE CASE OF: MINA JURY

CONVICTION:

1847: Theft

SENTENCE:

Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land for seven years

Originally from Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Mina Jury (born c1828 as Euphemia McCauldfield) was dismissed from her position as a domestic servant at the age of 17 for stealing jewellery from her employer. Found guilty at trial in 1847, she was sentenced to be transported for seven years. On board the convict ship John Calvin, she arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) the following year.

Jury spent a short amount of time as a thirdclass convict – those undertaking a punishment handed down by magisterial sentences or by the Supreme Court – and was granted a ticket of leave in 1851. By then, she had married a free man named Francis Jury, a coxswain in the penal colony, and the pair would go on to have 11 surviving children. For a while, it seemed that Jury had a relatively comfortable life until Francis’ death in 1867.

The robbery for which she had been convicted and transported remained Jury’s only offence for nearly 20 years, but in 1873 she was summoned back to England to testify in a high profile court case. It was then that she returned to a life of crime. Over the next 15 years, she was in and out of prison, including seven years of penal servitude, which would have seen her experience time in the ‘separate and silent system’, where prisoners were kept isolated from each other (see page 48). Wanted advertisements for Jury, who was accused of “stealing money and bedclothes”, appear until the end of 1890, but it is unknown whether she was ever apprehended. She disappears from records thereafter.

*Information courtesy of Dr Lucy Williams via the Digital Panopticon website, a database of records relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Visit digitalpanopticon.org

“Once freed, many chose to remain in Australia, where they could maybe buy some land of their own”

against transportation. The number of capital offences had gradually declined, nand the prevailing attitude was that imprisonment was the superior form of punishment, following a swathe of reforms and the building of new prisons. Australians themselves also began to criticise Britain for using theirh home as a place to offload its

“criminal class” . Transportation to

Australia ended in 1868, when Britain finally opted to keep its criminals on its own shores. d